Research

My legal work and my research feed each other. Representing veterans before the discharge and record-correction boards — now through the Institute for Constitutional Military Law — puts me in regular contact with the administrative record: what the boards were told, what they credited, and what they left unaddressed. These three lines of inquiry grew out of patterns in that record.

A study of military discharge classifications, veterans' rights, and the institutions charged with reviewing and correcting military records.

Two statutes control most of this work. Under 10 U.S.C. § 1553, the service Discharge Review Boards may change a discharge characterization within fifteen years of separation. Under 10 U.S.C. § 1552, the Boards for Correction of Military or Naval Records may correct any military record to remedy an error or injustice, and are not bound by that fifteen-year limit.

Layered on top are three Department of Defense memoranda that changed how these boards are supposed to decide cases involving mental health. The 2014 Hagel memorandum directed boards to give liberal consideration to claims that post-traumatic stress contributed to the conduct underlying a discharge. The 2017 Kurta memorandum extended that standard to traumatic brain injury, military sexual trauma, and other mental health conditions, and set out the specific questions a board is required to answer. The 2018 Wilkie memorandum directed boards to weigh clemency, rehabilitation, and fundamental fairness.

The policy is clear enough on paper. The open question is what happens in the decisions themselves — whether boards engage the evidence that liberal consideration requires, how denials are explained, and what the written record shows about an institution asked to review its own past judgments. Doctrine is easy to state and difficult to audit. The decisions are where the answer is.

An inquiry into the implementation of post-deployment health screening, veterans' accounts of assessments that were never administered, and how those gaps are treated in later administrative decisions.

10 U.S.C. § 1074f requires the Department of Defense to maintain a medical tracking system for deployed service members, including examinations before and after deployment that assess mental health. In practice, that post-deployment screening is the DD Form 2796. A related provision, 10 U.S.C. § 1074m, requires periodic person-to-person mental health assessments across the deployment cycle.

Veterans frequently report that screening they were entitled to either never happened or happened in a form that could not surface what they were carrying. This inquiry concerns what follows from that gap — whether a missing or perfunctory assessment is recognized in later decisions about discharge characterization and benefits eligibility, and what it means for an institution to rely on a record that was never properly made.

A book project about social cohesion, democratic stability, and the conditions that allow people to sustain a shared political life. It sits at some distance from the discharge cases but shares their preoccupation: what holds when institutions are no longer trusted to correct themselves.